1. Field of the Invention
The field of the invention is data processing, or, more specifically, methods, apparatus, and products for detecting data transmission errors in an Inter-Integrated Circuit (‘I2C’) system.
2. Description of Related Art
The Inter-Integrated Circuit (‘I2C’) data communications interface and protocol is used widely throughout computing and electronic systems for various reasons including the robustness and stability of the protocol. The protocol, however, does have a few limitations. One limitation, for example, is that the protocol does not support error detection and correction techniques such as parity bits. At the present, acknowledgements of receipt of a data transmission are utilized to provide some indication that data was received, but no error detection or error correction is provided by the I2C standard. Adding a parity bit into the I2C standard data patterns will increase the bit length of data transmissions, thereby lowering overall data transmission bandwidth. What is needed, therefore, is a way to include parity information in an I2C data transmission without lowering the overall effective bandwidth of the data signal.